His four other shops had a waiting list for appointments six months in advance, but in this location, a bride was lucky if she could get one starting a year out. That Aunt Emmie had gotten us one not six weeks after the ring had been slipped on my finger was proof alone to me that my honorary aunt had connections that offered endless possibilities.
“Emmie, beautiful, so lovely to see you again.” Paul greeted her with an air kiss to each cheek. “And your clone is with you, I see.” He shot a wink at Mia, who gave him a small wave. Turning, his gaze went to the rest of us. “And who is my bride today? Where is Lucy?”
I lifted my hand, but I shouldn’t have even bothered. The moms were already talking. “My daughter.”
“We called ahead and had the dresses set out for us,” Natalie told him, both of them stepping forward before I could even move.
Paul gave them tight smiles. “Yes, we have them already waiting in the changing room.” He walked around the two mothers and took my hand. As soon as I felt his cool touch and the way he squeezed my fingers, I relaxed. “Ladies, my assistant will show you where you can wait. Lucy and I will be trying on the dresses.”
Trusting him completely, I went with him. We walked through the store to the changing rooms in the back, passing even more dresses that were so beautiful they took my breath away. But not a single one of the dresses I saw on the long walk was what I saw myself walking down the aisle in.
“So, tell me about this boy who has captured your heart,” Paul encouraged as he opened the door to a spacious changing room where three thick bags were already hanging.
I relaxed even more, happy to share everything about Harris with this man who had helped thousands of other women find the perfect dress for their special day. “Harris has been my best friend since I was nine. We grew up in the same world with the same problems. Being rocker brats.”
Paul grinned. “I’ve seen you quite often in the press over the years, dear. So I can imagine that must be a crazy lifestyle. Do you ever wish your parents had a different career?”
“It’s exhausting,” I told him honestly. “But I love my dad, and I wouldn’t trade him for any other one in the world.”
“A daddy’s girl, I see.”
“To the day I die,” I said with a genuine smile.
He turned to the three dress bags, and I noticed the Post-its on the hangers. The one on the left had Natalie’s name on it, the one in the middle my mom’s, and Aunt Emmie’s was on the right. The bags were solid white, so I couldn’t see what the dresses looked like underneath, but they were so bulky I instinctively knew without having to look that these dresses were nothing like what I wanted.
“Let’s start with Emmie’s choice,” he suggested when I just stood there staring unenthusiastically at the closed bags. “I have a feeling that the mother of the bride and the mother of the groom want to see their choices last.”
All I could do was nod because my throat had tightened up and my voice refused to work.
Paul carefully unzipped the bag and took the dress out. It was a beautiful ball gown with enough tulle to make three more dresses. The bodice was covered in crystals, and it had a pretty sweetheart neckline. It was an amazing dress, but this one just wasn’t me.
But what Lana had said at breakfast came back to me, and I put on my public smile and stepped into the dress. I grimaced at myself in the mirror as Paul did up the buttons on the back. With the pretty little tiara Arella and Trinity had put on me earlier, I did look like a princess, but at the same time, I felt fat. The dress hid everything on my body except for my boobs, which were very much on display due to the corseted bust.
My dad would flip if he saw me in this thing.
“I can see that this dress is not something you like.”
“I’m excited,” I assured him. “Excited to take it off.”
Paul threw back his head and laughed heartily. “I love your honesty, Lucy Thornton.” He opened the door for me and helped me get the mountain of tulle through before leading me to where my entourage was waiting.
They were seated on three long sofas in front of trifold mirrors, drinking bottles of water. As I approached with Paul’s help so I didn’t get tangled up in the dress, all eyes zeroed in on me.
“So pretty!” Arella and Trinity said with soft, dreamy sighs at the same time.
“Wow, that looks better on you that I ever imagined,” Aunt Emmie gushed as she stood and came over to stand beside me as I turned to face the mirrors. “You look exactly like a princess now.”
I gritted my teeth. Princess. I didn’t want to be a damn princess. From the moment I had become Jesse Thornton’s daughter, people had called me the Rocker Princess. It was a title I’d always hated, and it was kind of like a slap in the face that Aunt Emmie didn’t understand that. She, of all people, understood the life we lived better than anyone else.
“I look fat,” I grumbled.
“Yep,” Lana said matter-of-factly from behind me.
“Agree,” Kin said, nodding her head in the mirror.
“How much tulle is on that dress?” Jenna asked with wide eyes. “I’ve never seen so much on one single dress in my life.”
Aunt Emmie’s bottom lip pouted out. “You don’t like it?”
I shrugged. “It’s not something I would have picked for myself.”
“You heard her, Em.” Natalie was on her feet now. “I knew she wouldn’t like this one. Lucy, try on mine next. It’s going to look fabulous on you, sweetie.”
“Yes, try on Nat’s,” Mom agreed. “That leaves mine for last, which is perfect.”
Swallowing my groan, I lifted the itchy skirt as best I could and headed back to the changing room. Ten minutes later, I was once again in front of the trifold, my discomfort even more apparent. Nat’s choice, like Aunt Emmie’s, was a ball gown. But this one was even bigger. The cathedral style bottom was dipped in crystals and actual gold flakes. The bodice was nothing but expensive crystals on top of satin, and my boobs literally felt like they were in my throat from how high the corset was pushing them. The neckline was cut down between my breasts, showing off even more of the girls than the last dress.
If my dad saw me in this dress, he would lose his mind.
“What do you think?” Nat asked from beside me, so excited to have my opinion that she was practically dancing.
“No.”
Her entire face fell. “You don’t like it at all?”
“Not even a little,” I told her point-blank. Maybe I was being harsh, but she needed to know I hated the dress and couldn’t—wouldn’t—walk down the aisle to marry her stepson in it. “I can barely breathe in this damn thing. I’m not a fan of gold, which you knew. And if I dared to get this dress, my dad would go apeshit the second he saw me in it.”
“Yup,” Lana agreed. Natalie shot her sister-in-law a pout, but my sister didn’t even blink. “What? It’s a beautiful dress, Nat. But this is something I could see you in, not Lucy. Like the last dress, it swallows her whole from the waist down. She looks like she’s pregnant. While the girls up top look like they are one sneeze away from flashing more than a little nip.”
Mom was already pushing me toward the changing room. “Now mine. Hurry, honey. I can’t wait to see you in my choice.”
I glanced back at my sister and my best friend. Lana and Kin both gave me encouraging smiles, but I couldn’t return them. Back in the dressing room, Paul helped me take off Nat’s choice and then opened the bag that held my mom’s.
The instant I saw it, I deflated. This dress… It wasn’t me in any shape or form. Not one single thing about it would have said to Mom: this is what your daughter will love. And for some weird reason, that hurt. Hurt more than anything else she could have said or done. From the moment Lana and I had become her responsibility when I was only four years old, we had been close. Even before she had adopted me, I had looked up to her, considered her more my mom than my sister. We had known each other to the core—to our souls.
That had changed when she found out about the cutting, though.
And now, it was like she didn’t know a single thing about me.
I swallowed my tears as Paul quietly helped me into the dress. I held them back as I stared half blindly at myself in the mirror. This wasn’t a ball gown like the other two had been, which was a small relief because I wasn’t sure I could have put on another voluminous dress today. The top was low-cut, but not so much that Dad would freak, and satin with only a single strap, which gave it a kind of Grecian feel. The fabric molded to my hips in a way that let the world see every one of my curves.
It was one of the most gorgeous dresses I had ever seen, ever worn.
“Take it off,” I whispered in a choked voice.
“Hmm?” Paul murmured and saw I had lost the battle of containing my tears as the first two fell. “Oh, dear—”
“Take it off,” I repeated, trying and failing to make my voice a little louder. “I…I can’t do this. Please, just take it off.”
He rushed to help me out of the dress, and I didn’t even give him time to put the dress back in the bag before I was pulling on the clothes I had arrived in. Swallowing my sob, I grabbed my purse and threw open the door. I couldn’t do this. It wasn’t fun anymore. Fuck, it hadn’t been fun all day. But after realizing my mom knew nothing about me now, I just couldn’t face trying on another single dress.
I ran for the exit, startling the brightly smiling receptionist as I pushed through the front door and out onto the street where I sucked in one lungful of fresh air after another. Tears poured down my face, and people walked widely around me as they went about their own business. I couldn’t do this right now. Not today. Mom had ruined it with the dress choice she had made.
Needing to be as far away from her as possible, I hailed a cab and jumped in just as the door to Paul’s shop opened behind me. “Lucy!” Lana called out.
“Just drive,” I told the man behind the wheel. “Go anywhere as long as it’s not here.”
“Lucy!” I turned my gaze back to my sister as she rushed toward the cab. But the moment she saw the tears pouring down my face, she stopped. For a single second, our gazes connected, and she gave me one simple nod before the driver was pulling into traffic.
I dropped my head back against the headrest and closed my eyes as snot and tears rolled down my face. I probably looked like a hot mess, but I couldn’t bring myself to care.
Not two minutes later, my phone started going off. I didn’t need to look to know it was my mom or Aunt Emmie or Natalie. I didn’t want to talk to any of them, even if I could have put two coherent words together right then, which I doubted I could. The cab driver kept shooting me concerned looks in the rearview mirror but smartly stayed quiet.
My heart felt broken, maybe even more so than when Tessa had sent me those damn videos of her and Harris. I could understand neither Aunt Emmie nor Natalie understanding what I might want in a wedding dress, but to have my mom not know broke something inside of me that had been bent from the moment she screamed at me once she found out about the self-harming.
She hadn’t even asked me once what I wanted in a dress since the whole wedding planning had begun. Fuck, she hadn’t asked me anything, really. Just told me what my options were and basically said choose. At breakfast, that was what it felt like the dress shopping was going to be like. Three choices. Choose one.
If Mom knew me, if she had cared enough to ask what I wanted in the most important dress of my life, she would have been able to pick one I would have gladly chosen for myself. Only she hadn’t.
She hadn’t asked me anything since I’d let her down. She simply stopped trying.
Maybe she had even stopped loving me that day.
Chapter 4
Lucy
Whenever someone found out about my cutting, the first question they always asked was a simple but fully loaded one.
Why?
Why did you do it?
Why do you still have to fight with yourself to not do it?
Why did something painful feel so good?
The answer wasn’t easy to explain. Not to them. Hell, not to myself.
It all started by accident. I hurt my foot while out on the beach behind my parents’ house one day, and the whole time it had been healing, the pain had grounded me. With that irritating physical pain at the forefront of my mind, I had been able to turn off all the chaos that weighed on me nearly every second of the day. And I had slept. There had been no nightmares of my biological father stealing me away. No fear of what my life might have turned into if Lydia Daniels hadn’t died and I hadn’t met my oldest sister. The ache in my soul at having forced myself to forget about my friendship with Harris had eased for a few hours, and I had woken up each morning feeling rejuvenated. A new person.
A new me.
But no sooner did the cut heal than it all came crashing back down on top of me. That was when the cutting started. Little cuts to the bottoms of my feet so no one would see. And if by chance they did see the tiny scars, I could explain them by saying I’d gotten them from running on the beach barefoot. Soon, I’d been able to cope enough that my mom thought I didn’t have to see my therapist every week. They stopped talking about medicating me for depression and anxiety. I could hide behind my smile and focus on the small pains that gave me such a rush of relief, it was almost orgasmic at times.
But that was gone now. I didn’t have those bursts of relief to help me micromanage all the shit that went through my head. I didn’t have the little sting of pain to focus on, and even though I put on a brave front to all the people who loved me and only wanted the best for me, I struggled every damn day not to pick up a blade and watch the blood well up on my skin. It was suffocating at times, and there were times when I was almost dizzy from the effort of not doing just that.
Right now, I ached for the feel of something sharp slicing through my skin. I needed to be grounded. I needed to put everything that just happened while dress shopping with my family into perspective. Maybe if I just made a tiny little cut, if I felt just a little pain, I could figure out if I had overreacted to that stupid-ass dress my mom picked out.
Or if she really had forgotten every single thing she should have known about me.
“Here we are, miss.”
My head snapped up at the sound of the slightly accented voice coming from the front seat. I had been so lost in my own head I hadn’t realized I was still sitting in the back of the cab. I vaguely remembered the man saying he needed a destination after the meter had bypassed fifty dollars. I had mumbled an address, not even thinking about where I should go.
Not home. Definitely not back to Paul’s. Not to my dad’s, because I never wanted him to see me the way I was at that moment.
A glance out the window showed me that, even as upset as I had been, I’d been coherent enough to seek help for the overwhelming need to make myself bleed. Hastily, I swiped my credit card to pay for my ride, added a tip, then opened the door. As soon as my feet touched the pavement of the driveway, I started running.
Fresh tears poured down my face as the door opened before I reached it, and Drake stepped out of the house with his arms open wide. I threw myself against him, burying my face in his chest as the sobs shook my body all over again.
“It’s okay, Lu,” he soothed, stroking a hand over my crazy hair. “I got you.”
He pulled me into the house, practically carrying me to the kitchen where he sat me at the table and then crouched down in front of me. Through my tears, I could barely make out his face, but I could still see the concern darkening his blue-gray eyes. “Angel called me. If you hadn’t shown up, I was coming looking for you. But I’m glad you came, honey.”
“I want to bleed,” I whispered, feeling ashamed but still aching for the pain.
“No, you don’t,” he argued and caught both my hands in one of his. His fingers tightened around mine, just firm enough to make me pay attention. “You’re upset and frustrated. Talk to m
e, Lu. Let me help you.”
I wiped my nose on my shoulder, not caring that I probably just covered him in snot. “It feels like Mom has forgotten everything she knows about me. It feels like…she doesn’t even care anymore.”
“Was the dress really so bad?” he asked reasonably.
“It was beautiful! It was the most amazing dress I’ve ever seen or worn.” I lowered my head as more tears fell, and it was like the dam broke and the words spewed out of me like vomit. I told him how the day had started once I had shown up at breakfast and how Mom had been on my case as soon as I walked through the door. How it felt like she and Nat and Aunt Emmie had drained the fun right out of the whole experience of picking my dress.
Then the words I thought I would never say filled the air. “She doesn’t even seem to like me most days, Drake. We’re strangers now, and I know it’s all my fault.”
“She loves you, Lucy.”
“I know that, but the way she treats me sometimes these days…” I shrugged. “Like I said, it feels like we’re strangers now.”
Drake gave me a few more minutes to cry it all out. There was no pity in his eyes, no judgment either. As I slowly began to calm down, I realized I had overreacted to the whole situation, and that just pissed me off. I was letting something like a dress wreck me, and I was stronger than that, even without the cutting.
“Let me take you back to the shop, Lu,” he offered when all my tears were gone. “Don’t let this pull you down. You’ve come so far, and I’m so fucking proud of you. But you need to face this head on instead of running from the situation.”